“O happy Earth! reality of Heaven!”: Melancholy and Utopia in Romantic Climatology

Abstract

Let the fish philosophise the ice away from the Rivers in winter time and they shall be at continual play in the tepid delight of summer. Look at the Poles and at the sands of Africa, Whirlpools and volcanoes-Let men exterminate them and I will say that they may arrive at earthly Happiness.- John Keats, Letter to George and Georgiana Keats, 21 April 1819Near the culmination of Queen Mab (1813), Percy Bysshe Shelley's cosmic fantasia of conjectural history and philosophical optimism, the poet offers a paean to a future Earth renovated and redeemed by a fortuitous combination of climate change and rational progress:O happy Earth! reality of Heaven!To which those restless souls that ceaselesslyThrong through the human universe, aspire;Thou consummation of all mortal hope!Thou glorious prize of blindly-working will!Whose rays, diffused throughout all space and time,Verge to one point and blend for ever there:Of purest spirits thou pure dwelling-place!Where care and sorrow, impotence and crime,Languor, disease, and ignorance dare not come:O happy Earth, reality of Heaven! (9.1-11)1Shelley's utopian imagines both human society and the natural world as purged of illness and vice, a state of heaven on Earth manifested not simply by the liberation from tyranny and superstition-those bugbears of Enlightenment- but by the melting of the polar ice caps and the greening of the deserts consequent upon a shift of Earth's rotational axis to a perpendicular with its ecliptic. Shelley derives this astronomical of progressive precession from earlier cosmologies that attributed shifts in Earth's rotation to causes ranging from geological eruptions and solar rays to human sin and the biblical flood. These cosmologies attracted Shelley both for their mechanisms of analogical causation and for their predictions of comprehensive reform. 2 Today's readers may or may not sympathize with the political and aesthetic motivations that caused a usually skeptical poet to adopt such farreaching theories. But Shelley's association of climate change with earthly happiness offers us a tragically misguided that should raise questions about Romantic affiliations with modern environmental imperatives. Shelley's fascination with a world remade reveals an imaginative hubris that, for all of his evocations of sublime abjection as a catalyst to virtuous action, may prove more an extension than a repudiation of technological domination and self-destructive exploitation.Jonathan Bate has called for new models of literary criticism to respond to the environmental crises now facing the planet, a Global Warming Criticism that would affirm the art of poetry as a vital link between human cultures and the natural ecosystems in which they have thrived. In so doing, criticism might valorize and assist an ecopoetics that helps to create as well as to reveal the dwelling-place of the human spirit and that regards poetic language as a special kind of expression which may effect an imaginative reunification of mind and nature, though it also has a melancholy awareness of the illusoriness of its own utopian vision (Bate 245). This melancholy awareness provides a critical check, in Bate's view, lest our modern reassertion of cultural organicism slide into familiar patterns of nationalist aggression and racialized totalitarianism. While recognizing these concerns, Bate maintains that Romanticism as an aesthetic ideology and a poetic practice helps to sustain our ethical obligations to each other and to the environment. Following Rousseau, he acknowledges humanity's irrevocable severance from a primordial state of nature and, following Schiller, emphasizes Romantic poetry's sentimental gestures as instantiating a formal and thematic awareness of this disruption. Timothy Morton has recently valorized melancholy in similar terms as the proper ethical response to environmental catastrophe, emphasizing not acquiescent despair, but a situation of grief within an ecological context. …